Keeping the media accountable

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Do you trust the media? Do you believe the news you read in the papers, watch on TV, listen to on radio or (more likely, these days) flick through on your mobile phone? Or do you think the media is full of fake news, controlled by big vested interests who are either spinning their version of the facts or suppressing the real story?

It’s Media Literacy Week in Australia this week. There are a series of activities and events designed to help people sort the good from the bad when it comes to news. ‘Media literacy skills’ are the skills you need to work out who is lying to you and who is not. To distinguish between fake news and real news. It’s a valuable exercise at a time when misinformation and disinformation abound.

Modern forms of communication have made it easier for propagandists and mischief-makers to invent fake news stories or to create biased and incomplete versions of the truth and to pass them off as the real thing. Once upon a time, the means of communicating information to a mass audience were limited. If you owned a television licence, a radio transmitter or a printing press, you had it made. Almost everyone else was left shouting on a street corner to be heard. Now, of course, the means of mass communication belong to us all. There are few barriers to posting on social media, starting a website or writing a blog, and the size of your audience is limited only by how interesting your message is.

It’s hard to argue that the democratisation of information and the power of free speech is not a good thing, but if it has a downside it is that the liars and cheats and deceivers have full rein to do their thing. New times need new skills, and so media literacy is one of the solutions to provide those skills.

But if media literacy is all about the obligations citizens have to navigate their way responsibly through the media landscape, what about the media organisations themselves? What are the obligations on the newspapers, television channels, radio stations and online media companies that want to earn the community’s trust? If the big mass media outlets expect people to choose wisely between real news and fake news, what are we doing to help?

The answer is that we are not doing as much as we should. A large part of the solution, though, rests in our own hands and it’s easy.

First, though, a little history will help. It’s easy to forget that newspapers and other media organisations have faced this kind of threat before, only in the past it came from within their own ranks. Over a hundred years ago, newspapers in the United States were engaged in a desperate bid to raise their circulations and make money. They wanted the public’s attention and the way they did it was often through fake news, only back then it wasn’t called fake news, it was called ‘yellow journalism’.

Newspapers relied on outrageous headlines, faked interviews and exaggerated partisan commentary to sell papers. In some cases, they just made things up. One of the most famous cases was the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, when the New York Sun briefly became the biggest selling newspaper in the world by revealing that the moon was populated by man-bats. I don’t want to disappoint you, but it’s not true.

Over time, journalism changed and largely cleaned up its act. I will leave you to judge how much we have improved, but for the most part the improvement came when the mainstream media decided to sign up to a set of minimum professional standards. Those standards vary from organisation to organisation, but the essential elements are consistent. Whether it is the ABC’s own editorial policies, the editorial standards of News Corporation, various Fairfax newspapers, commercial TV channels or the professional code that covers members of the journalists’ union, you will see some common threads that help define the difference between real news and fake news.

All responsible media organisations promise to aim for accuracy, to tell all sides of a story, to use covert activities only when the public interest justifies it and to disclose conflicts of interest. Some, like the ABC, promise never to take an editorial stand or express an opinion, while others promise to make clear the distinction between their reporting and their commentary.

These policies and codes of practice can be hard to find sometimes, and media organisations don’t always do as much as they could to promote them and hold themselves accountable to them. But if we are worried about the rise of fake news, then all media outlets need to commit themselves anew to these standards and to invite the public to judge us by them. If we uphold them, then we can rightly claim to be more trustworthy, more reliable and more valuable than any other source of information. If we don’t, then we need the public we serve to let us know in no uncertain terms.

So as Australians navigate Media Literacy Week, I invite everyone to take this opportunity to engage with the media organisations you trust, or would like to trust, and see if we are doing what we promise to do. More than ever, the world needs sources of information that are ethical and reliable, and it’s time to demand we do what we promise.

Alan Sunderland

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